Well, they are new at least. The new installers/updaters are now posted. Version 2.06 fixes Linux DVD problems, but also has two features that should be nice for users who beta test heavily (and grab full demo installs off the net to do so):
- The new installer/updater keeps net connections alive, which really helps download rates per connection.
- The new installer/updater connects once to each server, balancing the load between servers.
Previously you had to pick one server and poke around until you found the fastest one. By keeping connections alive and using all servers, we should get fast, even download times for everyone.
Wouldn’t something based on delta-transfer (rsync, for example) be more efficient?
No – the updater is ALREADY delta based. It has been this way for years!
But suppose that we have X-Plane.exe at version 9.65.
It seems that instead downloading only the delta from 9.65 → 9.66, it downloads the full X-Plane.exe (compressed with ZIP).
Is it just a wrong impression that I am having?
The delta is per _file_. So whole files are always transferred. Delta transfer would require finding the deltas within the files, which would be significantly more complicated and possibly slower for very little improvement.
Ben, I really doubt that. There are some pretty nifty and fast algorithms out there for binary deltas… you could precompute the deltas for the last couple of releases, add a checksum to make sure the user has one of those installed and if yes, then just transfer the delta and apply it to what he already has installed. And otherwise fall back to downloading the whole file.
Dirk, if you have numbers for how much bandwidth we could save on various updates (old to new, relatively new to new) using inter-file deltas, I promise that I will at least look at the numbers. (That’s all I can promise…inter-version updates are already adequately fast. This isn’t really where we need to focus company resources.)
Where are they? On the downloads page I still see version 2.05 listed. thx
Page Fixed!
Hey Ben,
Really enjoying the blog. In the process of converting over to XP, and was going to write the dev team a note about this anyway, but here’s a topical post on the very topic… 🙂
One thing that you may want to address at some point in the installer is the constant errors that come when copying the files off the disk (for Windows, anyway – haven’t tried on other platforms). I have a brand-new set of XP9 fresh out of the wrapper, installing for the first time, and got at least one or two errors on each disc, varying from “Error performing inpage operation”, to IO errors, to ‘Too many open files’. Invariably I’d have to hit ‘Continue’ to get it going again, which meant installing the files took over three days since I have to work and sleep and so wasn’t able to babysit. Obviously disc changes are expected, but the errors really slowed things down. I’m definitely not alone from the forum searches, and I know the hardware is fine as I’ve installed FS02, FS04, FSX what seems like 50 times now for development, not counting MegaScenery and all those.
Even just an automated ‘retry’ function before popping up an actual ‘stop’ would be helpful. We all know first impressions matter, after all. 🙂
-Tim
Tim – I do _not_ know what’s going on with your installer – please _email_ me to sort this out.
Beneficial weblog, I must say i enjoy updates by you.